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Chinese becoming popular with US learners
(China Daily)
Updated: 2006-02-23 05:32
While English learning has been the rage in China for decades, Chinese as a
foreign language is just starting to catch on on the other side of the Pacific
Ocean.
The study of Chinese used to be concentrated on a few college campuses and in
large ethnic Chinese communities on both coasts of North America. But now it is
spreading to places where, only a decade ago, such a widespread and sustained
interest in the language seemed unimaginable.
American student
Gabriel Schaffner sits a Chinese language test in Beijing. [China
Daily] | When Sharon Wen went to the University of Houston to teach Chinese in 1994,
she had only 26 students. This semester she has 170. "I would have had more if
the business school had not removed Chinese as a mandatory course," she said.
Wen explained that enthusiasm in the Chinese language began to take shape in
the 1980s. After a brief dip in 1989, it gradually regained momentum in the
early 1990s. In recent years, enrolment growth has been steady.
Although Chinese is clearly enjoying a rise in popularity, it is far from
being the most popular foreign language in North America and, according to most
people interviewed for this article, probably will never be.
Spanish and French have traditionally been the most popular candidates for a
second language.
Large numbers of Latin American immigrants have made Spanish a useful tool
for communication in the United States. In cities such as Los Angeles and
Houston, as many as one-third of the television channels are in Spanish or have
a Spanish simulcast audio channel. In Canada, French is an official language.
In a 2002 survey of US colleges and universities by the Modern Language
Association in New York, 746,267 students were enrolled in Spanish classes and
34,153 in Chinese classes. In fact, Chinese ranked 7th, behind Spanish, French
(201,979), German (91,100), Italian (63,899), American Sign Language (60,781)
and Japanese (52,238).
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